I also want to know this. is this a "legal" xss attack where overstock et al. grab your facebook cookie and use that to transmit data to facebook?
besides the privacy concerns it seems an absolutely stupid feature at this time of year. the number of ruined surprises will piss off at least as many people as the privacy violations i'll bet.
wrong, this very well could be what is happening. kmail (the KDE mail app) has a very similar bug with pop email. If your hard drive gets full while the "fetcher" thread is downloading mail, there is no way for this thread to notify the parent process, which then happily issues the delete command to the POP server once the "fetcher" returns... and bamo! No email downloaded (cause the disk is full) and the email is deleted from the server... all gone to the bit bucket. The only fix to this problem is to "de-multithread" the application. Which is why Kmail still has this problem (it was reported 3 years ago, and I found the bug 2 years ago, but I don't have time to re-write kmail to not use the fetcher thread).
It could very easily be that the thread that is actually doing the move has no way to notify the parent that the copy failed, that thread fails out, but the parent thread happily deletes the local copy cause it doesn't know that the copy failed.
I didn't know you could "trademark" a thing. I thought trademarks were IP on a word or phrase. The word "Wii" does not appear anywhere on the "knock off", and I don't even think the two devices look very similar. Unless you can "trademark" "a small white device with buttons to wirelessly control a device", but I bet 90% of TV remotes would violate that "trademark". Further, the "knock off" wouldn't violate it because it isn't wirelessly controlling anything.
All of the businesses I've seen this happen to advertised in multiple channels, msn, yahoo, google, the yellow pages (online and print), newspapers, radio. Just so happened that ~90% of the sales and solid leads all came from google. It's the only thing that works reliably online from my experience.
It's not a question of a "bad business model" its a question of having a limited marketing budget, and spending the money where it "works". You cannot just take an adwords budget, move it to yahoo and get the same results. You can't move it to MSN and get the same results either. The clicks and sales simply aren't there. The are on google, period, end of story.
Well, just because walmart employees can't tell them apart doesn't mean your average 6 year old can't.
Personally, I have no problem telling them apart and I've only seen a Wii once for about 5 minutes...
Sure this is probably a violation of some intellectual property law or other... but aren't we always complaining about those laws and how stupid and unnecessarily restrictive they are? We defended Lindows and said "you'd have to be an idiot to confuse Lindows with Windows". Personally I'm from the camp of idiocy gets what it deserves. If you're too dumb or ignorant to tell these 2 devices apart, then you deserve to have your money taken. I know my 8 year old brother wouldn't be fooled by the knock off, so why should anyone? Or are we all willing to say that the average adult is dumber than an average 8 year old? And, if that is what we're saying HOW IS THAT OK OR ACCEPTABLE?!?
And that is the problem with google. These businesses advertised through many different channels, yahoo, msn, yellow pages, and google. Just so happens that ~90% of the good leads and sales came from google.
Google while not being a monopoly, really is THE ONLY way to advertise online, nothing else works reliably that I've seen.
Unfortunately, when someone decides they are going to click fraud your ads, well there isn't anywhere to hide, you can't just take your google budget and put it on yahoo and expect an equal return, its not there, your sales disappear overnight. And the length of time it takes to get google customer service to respond is way too long to save a company from a death spiral when sales dry up overnight.
it isn't a question of setting sensible limits, they had limits in place, the point is once your budget is exhausted (your limit reached) your ads no longer run, and you get 0 sales. When someone click frauds your ad, and exhausts your budget at 12:05am, well guess how many sales you're going to get that day? Guess how much you're going to spend for those zero sales? That's right, you're entire budget will still go to Google, and you will get zero sales. Have that happen for 3 weeks straight and guess what? You can't make payroll, you have to lay off staff, another 2-3 weeks and you don't make rent, you go out of business.
Google takes 6-8 months sometimes to resolve click fraud issues like this. By then its way too late, you're out of business.
Google didn't intentionally "kill" these businesses, but they are bad at monitoring and fixing click fraud. And it is not in google's interest to monitor and fix click fraud (at least not initially) as the more clicks the more money they make.
The businesses I have seen go under got caught in this trap, they are advertising on google, they are getting sales, things are going great. Then one day out of no where sales stop... they investigate and see that their ads are running for 15 minutes a day because someone is clicking the ad 1500 times in 10 minutes and exhausting their budget. Now they are spending their entire budget and getting zero sales. It doesn't take long like that to put a business under.
I agree with your comment on point number 3, however, if we aren't going to apply the same "rules" to Google as we are to MS, then how hypocritical is that? Further, we're just asking for another monopoly beat down by not being wary. That same argument can be used to excuse MS's practices. "Well MS wanted to get into the xyz market, and they thought company abc would be a good way to do it, but abc wanted too much, so what choice did MS have but to steal their idea/tech and run with it?"
it wasn't a case of the clicks getting more expensive, these were all cases of click fraud. They went from having a 50-75 clicks per day to having 1500 clicks in under an hour, and having 0 sales for those 1500 clicks. Where previously 50 clicks would get them 5-10 sales, now they have 1500 clicks and 0 sales.
And google is extremely bad about handling this, even today these businesses (6 months later) have not been refunded a penny for the marketing expenses incurred, and they are no longer in business because their sales completely dried up.
I would have to disagree with at least points 1 and 2, and with the free411 case probably 3 as well.
1) I personally know 3 businesses that are out of business because of adwords shenanigans which Google to this day denies. These businesses saw their adwords budgets increase by orders of magnitude, and click throughs and sales plummet by orders of magnitude.
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
2) They are "forcing" adwords customers to have their ads listed on "link sites". that is a bad product, and if you are on adwords you are FORCED to have your ads listed there as there is no way to opt out
3) by pulling the ultimate MS move with free411 they are most certainly participating in anticompetitive behavior.
Luckily I have pretty complete backups and 99.9% of my work is done on servers and saved there, gotta love version control (yes for everything, even my music directory).
I just reformatted and am performing a clean install.
The thing that is strange is I have 0 third party things installed on this laptop, I have a couple text editors (could text mate cause this?), but nothing like APE or any of the other things that have been mentioned in the thread at apple.
I'm not 100% convinced this isn't just an upgrade problem with leopard itself. I'm actually happy the upgrade failed, cause it was about time to clean this thing up... It's been a year since I got it, and that's a long time for me for an OS install to last...
Who the hell cares about overclocking a GPU?! Further, why would/should this be a necessary thing to do?!
That's great that you can preempt the GPU... I guess. Somehow linux and OSX manage to duplicate most of vista's "shiny new" graphic effects without preempting the GPU, so either linux and OSX are better designed or this is just one more useless "feature" from MS.
Most of the world (read everyone but hardcore gamers) use computers for real work. My mom isn't going to care that her GPU got preempted while she was checking her email. I certainly don't want any graphics running on my web servers or DB servers, that's just a waste of processor time. My compile farm doesn't need to be wasting time dealing with graphics either. My developer team doesn't need to have time on their machines wasted by graphics either, sure they use GUIs, but WinXP, OS X, and Linux all perform the necessary tasks and don't get in the way (or require 2GB of RAM just to load the OS). Sure all our systems have at least 2GB of RAM, but we want to use that for compiling, running lots of applications, not loading the OS.
My 1.5 year old macbook pro runs circles around my cube mates 3 week old vista laptop. Oh yeah, and my macbook was ~$700 cheaper. He is constantly cursing his new system, well was, until I helped him install Ubuntu on it, now it runs fast. If your whole reason for supporting Vista is GPU preemption, well, I'm pretty sure thats a mistake.
Why are people acting like the studies in 1991/2 can't be valid?
Just because they weren't connected to a monitor, typewriters have existed for many decades.
I don't think they are any more "ergonomic" than current computer keyboards. Point being, why did CTS suddenly become this dire disease that everyone was worried about just now in the last 10 years? People have been typing hundreds of words per minute for at least the last 60 years.
Further, there are many many jobs in manufacturing that required repetitive movements. Why don't these repeated movements cause CTS?
I've worried on and off about CTS since I first heard about it in the late 90's. I've been typing > 100wpm since I was 14 and using a computer > 10 hours/day since at least 1995. I've never had any symptoms, but these studies do reduce my concern over the "cause" of CTS.
Your first point is the biggest problem with RoR. Rails is hideously bad at playing nice with others. Have a legacy DB that Rails didn't create for you? As another reply said, if I see that is the case, I rule out Rails as a web framework right there. It won't work end of story.
AR really wants the DB set up in its particular way, and if its not, nothing will make it work.
There are many many more mature and powerful ORMs out there that will handle this kind of thing, some are built into existing web frameworks... but RoR and AR are not it. If you aren't starting completely from scratch (meaning database too) then RoR is the wrong choice 100% of the time.
Of course, these "trials" would just be a big get out of jail free card for all terrorists. It's not like the army has the time, money, manpower to reconstruct a battle and get incontrovertible evidence that combatant X fired rifle Y at 8:32pm and wounded or killed Soldier Z.
In a real trial, that is what you have to have to convict. Probably a great boon for CSI's.. There'd be thousands of new jobs running around Iraq and Afghanistan trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these people are bad. Probably get a lot of dead CSIs too... but anyway.
My point is, wouldn't it be trivially easy for these guys to get off? Firing guns and throwing grenades (with gloves on) one minute see they are about to lose, throw all their guns in a heap before the US gets too close, go to the enemy combatant trial. The US says "You were on the battle field" they say "yeah but we weren't fighting you, the guys who were fighting ran off, you have no proof that we fired weapons at you". And they'd be right. These guys would get off in a US court of law 100% of the time. Probably any court set up by the UN would be at least as nice to criminals as the US courts.
So then the only option is "we found these 100 guys and we killed them on the battlefield". Because if you take them prisoner, they'll be back out there 2 weeks later shooting at you again.
Ok, Python is slower than C, C++ and Java... Guess what? So are PHP, Ruby, Perl, and every other interpreted language.
However, if it takes me 10 programmer hours to create a python program (or PHP, Ruby, Perl) program, and the program takes 10 seconds to process 50,000 records from my database while the C version of this program takes 500 programmer hours and takes 1 second to process 50,000 records.... how long does it take before the C program is faster?
about 9.8 billion records... well, at our current rate of record growth, I'll be there in about year 2500, even assuming 50% growth/yr (completely unsustainable for any enterprise past 10 years) its still 2100 before the time saved by the program equals the time saved on programming time... Not to mention CPU time costs less than 1 cent/hr, and programmers are much more expensive.
And for the record, we have done this. We recently re-wrote a C application in python, the original application took 5 programmers 3 years to create, we recreated it in python with 2 programmers in 6 months, it is feature complete vs the C implementation, it is slower, but not outside of what would be considered reasonable. We also haven't even tried to optimize it at all... which we could do and probably at least get 10-20% improvements in performance.
Now, in saying this am I saying interpreted languages are the answer to every problem? No! Sometimes, you need C, sometimes there are problems that can't be solved well in any specific language. If there was a be all end all language, we'd all be using it. Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby all have their place, in general I prefer Python because I find it much more intuitive than Perl, I find generally better programmers advertising Python jobs than advertising PHP jobs, and I just like it better than Ruby
You obviously have very little experience with java programs.
All java programs require some version or other of java, and if java has made incompatible changes (they have) between releases, you need 2 versions of the JVM to run 2 different programs (if those programs require says 1.4 and 5 respectively). This can be extremely fun, especially since each JVM is going to take up 2-300MB of ram...
I have seen this problem deploying enterprise java apps hundreds of times, it is pretty much constant "Oh, I want to run App1 version 3.2 which requires Java 1.3, I also want to run App2 version 6.4 which requires Java 6" Have Fun!
I agree the piece was a little heavy on fluff, and I agree we should try to figure out the stuff we don't know. I think he advocates for that as well... at least I got that feeling. I got the feeling he would like people to take a "lets know what we're doing before we do it" approach.
I am really all for cleaning up the environment, I would love an electric car, I would love good solar panels, or nuclear energy. I hate oil (for the political problems it causes more than pollution, but still...), but in their current incarnations they aren't good enough, they are too expensive, too unreliable, and would cause a lot of harm to the economy and standard of living of the developed world.
But the sky is falling FUD as you put it really irks me. I really feel the global warming proponents are rushing to conclusions. It's a bit like seeing you have some physical symptom and going to the emergency room and getting every possible treatment regardless of cost without getting a proper diagnosis first, at least that is how I feel most of the time when I hear them. And when I see people saying things like "Well, we should just believe the climatologists, because the worst case will be horrible, and if we don't start fixing it now it'll be too late!" That argument drives me crazy... again same thing... well you might have cancer, or it might be liver failure, or you might need a bone marrow transplant, or maybe its nothing and it will go away in 3 days. But if we wait the 3 days and it is one of the other 3, you'll be better off for starting treatment early so we better just do all 3 of the massive treatments now!
The earth is not nearly outside of historical parameters in CO2, temperatures, sea level, or anything else you can think of.
The earth has seen nearly 20 times more CO2 in the atmosphere in the last million years. It has seen a period with no ice at all on greenland. It has seen temperatures 10C warmer and 10C cooler than current temperatures. the IPCC says (not science, a governmental body run by lobbyists, and politicians) man probably is causing "some" warming. They don't say how much, they don't say how likely, just probably... that could be 51%. And, why is "warming" undesirable? I have yet to get a decent answer on that one. I like it when its warm. I like sunny summer days, I like grass, and green trees, and rain. Snow is fun as a novelty.. but it sucks after a couple weeks. I like the idea of being able to grow crops for 9-10 months out of the year, all the way up into southern canada. I like the idea of having vineyards in the UK again (yeah, in the mideval warm period they grew grapes in GB, something nearly impossible today) and that was only 500-800 years ago, that it was that much warmer in Europe.
Now, the only thing I'll agree with you on is your last point, we should stop subsidizing terrorists, and we should free ourselves from the grip of foreign oil, because that is the right policy direction for the country. But, if we had huge oil reserves, I would say burn those before we spend billions if not trillions on renewables. Of course nuclear power would make this all moot... and that is what we really should do
1) your quip about "betting their life" on climatologists being wrong is quite bone headed. People bet their lives every day, and on things much more certain. You bet your life every time you get in a car. Guaranteed 50k people will die this year in the US riding in cars. Why don't you stop betting your life on that "sacred" convenience? How many people is climate change going to kill this year? Even if the "worst case" happens how many people is climate change going to kill? What are the chances you are one of those people? Why should I spend my life's savings buying an electric car, putting solar panels on my roof (that I'll have to replace every 20 years), and in general destroying my standard of living to avoid a calamity that NO ONE can even put anything like a percentage on.
2) Why not assume they are right? Because the costs are astronomical! It's not a "sacred" lifestyle, its a lifestyle that has lengthened life expectancy by 30 years in just 100. You go live "sustainably" for a few years in africa, come back and tell me how that was for you. Modern life requires the use of energy. I would be more than happy to have an electric car, to not use fossil fuels, but, if it means that I have to work longer hours, or harder to maintain the same amount of freedom, then no its not worth it. And that is what it means today because it is way more expensive. Now, if you environmentalists would let us build some nuclear power plants, we could probably solve all the problems.
The problem isn't purely meteorological. That is why the models don't work. Sure they are complicated and very advanced, but they don't take into account the increased carbon sequestration that plants automatically do when presented with higher CO2 in the atmosphere (as he states in the article). And they also aren't very good at dealing with random things like clouds, dust, or other non-fluid dynamics type phenomena.
I love how you just out of hand discredit him because he's not an "expert" in the field. As if thinking rational people can't have a debate about something unless they have a PhD and 20 years experience in a field. How many advanced science degrees does Al Gore have? Years experience studying climate models? Years spent in Antarctica studying climate? Why does he get to be an "expert" in the field? Dyson is a pretty smart guy you know. Physics and all that, I think he might have at least a basic understanding of fluid dynamics, energy transfer, energy storage... yeah pretty much the basics of "climate". I'd certainly listen to and trust him before Al Gore...
I'm not an "expert" in the field though so don't listen to me either. Of course the only people you will admit to being "experts" in the field will be people who agree with your world view.
I really don't think so. What I read said "I studied the models, and they don't take x, y, or z into account, because we don't understand them, but certainly x, y and z have an effect on climate, therefore the models are oversimplifications and cannot be trusted"
He is not arguing from incredulity, he is stating that the models don't take important factors into account because they are extremely hard to model, or we have never measured them and therefore don't have a dataset to put into a model.
The models as he states do a great job with fluid dynamics, but they suck at clouds, dust (probably smoke from forest fires and volcanoes too), and anything else that doesn't fit in a fluid dynamics world... which is quite a lot really. And I'm sure you'll come back with "well, if we wait to see if the models are right or not, it'll be too late, so we have to ACT NOW!" That is the default response from any global warming nazi when challenged with "why don't we try to really figure out whats happening before we spend trillions of dollars fixing a problem that might not exist?"
I swear you environmentalists are crazy. What you are proposing would be like you go to the doctor, you have a slight fever, he does a single test that is incorrect 50% of the time, and then recommends you spend $1,000,000 to get a liver transplant, kidney transplants, heart transplant, bone marrow transplant, and just for fun, chemo cause it might be cancer too. Or, maybe you should just take a Tylenol and call him in the morning? But no, if we wait for just 10 minutes and think about it, and try to get a better diagnosis, well if the first diagnosis is right then you'll be dead, so better just go with that!
Yeah... great record keeping like the NASA scientists who had a bug in their code? You did read the article earlier today where some hobbyist on the internet found a huge error, 1998 isn't the warmest year on record now. You know that the last decade isn't the warmest on record anymore either right? Yeah the 1930's get that distinction again... now that NASA isn't lying about their data anymore.
Anyway, the point isn't "is the world getting warmer" it is "are we causing it" and maybe "can we fix it or should we". The first can be seen (to some extent) in measurements, in shrinking glaciers... Of course, the glaciers have been shrinking for the last 12,000 years since the last ice age, obviously we didn't cause the end of the last ice age, we didn't cause any of the shrinking of glaciers from then until 1900... but you claim we are 100% responsible for the shrinking since then? Based on what evidence? What science? What experiments? Or do you contend that the glaciers were as large in 1900 as they were 12000 years ago, and they weren't shrinking before 1900?
The other 2 questions he answers by saying "we don't know and can't know, but its highly improbably given trends since the last ice age", and "no we shouldn't fix it because a warmer climate is generally better for everyone".
As he points out very clearly in his article, the "global warming proponents" aren't relying on measurement, observations, or scientific method either. They are relying on computer models. Very poor ones at that. The models aren't capable of recreating the climate, or even a meaningful subset of the climate and the complicated interactions that happen between all of the earth's pieces. That is all he is saying, that we don't have enough information, that the world appears to be getting warmer, but that the cause is unknown, and really unknowable, and he says "heretically" that even if we are causing the warming is that such a bad thing? Will it be bad to have warmer winters? longer growing seasons? more rain? (he lays out quite clearly that in warmer periods in Africa and Europe those continents see an increase in precipitation). He also suggests a way to "combat" carbon in the atmosphere and shows the huge insignificance of the CO2 levels.... If we were to sequester all of the carbon in the atmosphere it would add 1/100th of an inch to the arable land on the planet.
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I also want to know this. is this a "legal" xss attack where overstock et al. grab your facebook cookie and use that to transmit data to facebook?
besides the privacy concerns it seems an absolutely stupid feature at this time of year. the number of ruined surprises will piss off at least as many people as the privacy violations i'll bet.
wrong, this very well could be what is happening. kmail (the KDE mail app) has a very similar bug with pop email. If your hard drive gets full while the "fetcher" thread is downloading mail, there is no way for this thread to notify the parent process, which then happily issues the delete command to the POP server once the "fetcher" returns... and bamo! No email downloaded (cause the disk is full) and the email is deleted from the server... all gone to the bit bucket. The only fix to this problem is to "de-multithread" the application. Which is why Kmail still has this problem (it was reported 3 years ago, and I found the bug 2 years ago, but I don't have time to re-write kmail to not use the fetcher thread).
It could very easily be that the thread that is actually doing the move has no way to notify the parent that the copy failed, that thread fails out, but the parent thread happily deletes the local copy cause it doesn't know that the copy failed.
I didn't know you could "trademark" a thing. I thought trademarks were IP on a word or phrase. The word "Wii" does not appear anywhere on the "knock off", and I don't even think the two devices look very similar. Unless you can "trademark" "a small white device with buttons to wirelessly control a device", but I bet 90% of TV remotes would violate that "trademark". Further, the "knock off" wouldn't violate it because it isn't wirelessly controlling anything.
All of the businesses I've seen this happen to advertised in multiple channels, msn, yahoo, google, the yellow pages (online and print), newspapers, radio. Just so happened that ~90% of the sales and solid leads all came from google. It's the only thing that works reliably online from my experience.
It's not a question of a "bad business model" its a question of having a limited marketing budget, and spending the money where it "works". You cannot just take an adwords budget, move it to yahoo and get the same results. You can't move it to MSN and get the same results either. The clicks and sales simply aren't there. The are on google, period, end of story.
Well, just because walmart employees can't tell them apart doesn't mean your average 6 year old can't.
Personally, I have no problem telling them apart and I've only seen a Wii once for about 5 minutes...
Sure this is probably a violation of some intellectual property law or other... but aren't we always complaining about those laws and how stupid and unnecessarily restrictive they are? We defended Lindows and said "you'd have to be an idiot to confuse Lindows with Windows". Personally I'm from the camp of idiocy gets what it deserves. If you're too dumb or ignorant to tell these 2 devices apart, then you deserve to have your money taken. I know my 8 year old brother wouldn't be fooled by the knock off, so why should anyone? Or are we all willing to say that the average adult is dumber than an average 8 year old? And, if that is what we're saying HOW IS THAT OK OR ACCEPTABLE?!?
And that is the problem with google. These businesses advertised through many different channels, yahoo, msn, yellow pages, and google. Just so happens that ~90% of the good leads and sales came from google.
Google while not being a monopoly, really is THE ONLY way to advertise online, nothing else works reliably that I've seen.
Unfortunately, when someone decides they are going to click fraud your ads, well there isn't anywhere to hide, you can't just take your google budget and put it on yahoo and expect an equal return, its not there, your sales disappear overnight. And the length of time it takes to get google customer service to respond is way too long to save a company from a death spiral when sales dry up overnight.
it isn't a question of setting sensible limits, they had limits in place, the point is once your budget is exhausted (your limit reached) your ads no longer run, and you get 0 sales. When someone click frauds your ad, and exhausts your budget at 12:05am, well guess how many sales you're going to get that day? Guess how much you're going to spend for those zero sales? That's right, you're entire budget will still go to Google, and you will get zero sales. Have that happen for 3 weeks straight and guess what? You can't make payroll, you have to lay off staff, another 2-3 weeks and you don't make rent, you go out of business.
Google takes 6-8 months sometimes to resolve click fraud issues like this. By then its way too late, you're out of business.
Google didn't intentionally "kill" these businesses, but they are bad at monitoring and fixing click fraud. And it is not in google's interest to monitor and fix click fraud (at least not initially) as the more clicks the more money they make.
The businesses I have seen go under got caught in this trap, they are advertising on google, they are getting sales, things are going great. Then one day out of no where sales stop... they investigate and see that their ads are running for 15 minutes a day because someone is clicking the ad 1500 times in 10 minutes and exhausting their budget. Now they are spending their entire budget and getting zero sales. It doesn't take long like that to put a business under.
I agree with your comment on point number 3, however, if we aren't going to apply the same "rules" to Google as we are to MS, then how hypocritical is that? Further, we're just asking for another monopoly beat down by not being wary. That same argument can be used to excuse MS's practices. "Well MS wanted to get into the xyz market, and they thought company abc would be a good way to do it, but abc wanted too much, so what choice did MS have but to steal their idea/tech and run with it?"
it wasn't a case of the clicks getting more expensive, these were all cases of click fraud. They went from having a 50-75 clicks per day to having 1500 clicks in under an hour, and having 0 sales for those 1500 clicks. Where previously 50 clicks would get them 5-10 sales, now they have 1500 clicks and 0 sales.
And google is extremely bad about handling this, even today these businesses (6 months later) have not been refunded a penny for the marketing expenses incurred, and they are no longer in business because their sales completely dried up.
I would have to disagree with at least points 1 and 2, and with the free411 case probably 3 as well.
1) I personally know 3 businesses that are out of business because of adwords shenanigans which Google to this day denies. These businesses saw their adwords budgets increase by orders of magnitude, and click throughs and sales plummet by orders of magnitude.
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
2) They are "forcing" adwords customers to have their ads listed on "link sites". that is a bad product, and if you are on adwords you are FORCED to have your ads listed there as there is no way to opt out
3) by pulling the ultimate MS move with free411 they are most certainly participating in anticompetitive behavior.
Luckily I have pretty complete backups and 99.9% of my work is done on servers and saved there, gotta love version control (yes for everything, even my music directory).
I just reformatted and am performing a clean install.
The thing that is strange is I have 0 third party things installed on this laptop, I have a couple text editors (could text mate cause this?), but nothing like APE or any of the other things that have been mentioned in the thread at apple.
I'm not 100% convinced this isn't just an upgrade problem with leopard itself. I'm actually happy the upgrade failed, cause it was about time to clean this thing up... It's been a year since I got it, and that's a long time for me for an OS install to last...
Who the hell cares about overclocking a GPU?! Further, why would/should this be a necessary thing to do?!
That's great that you can preempt the GPU... I guess. Somehow linux and OSX manage to duplicate most of vista's "shiny new" graphic effects without preempting the GPU, so either linux and OSX are better designed or this is just one more useless "feature" from MS.
Most of the world (read everyone but hardcore gamers) use computers for real work. My mom isn't going to care that her GPU got preempted while she was checking her email. I certainly don't want any graphics running on my web servers or DB servers, that's just a waste of processor time. My compile farm doesn't need to be wasting time dealing with graphics either. My developer team doesn't need to have time on their machines wasted by graphics either, sure they use GUIs, but WinXP, OS X, and Linux all perform the necessary tasks and don't get in the way (or require 2GB of RAM just to load the OS). Sure all our systems have at least 2GB of RAM, but we want to use that for compiling, running lots of applications, not loading the OS.
My 1.5 year old macbook pro runs circles around my cube mates 3 week old vista laptop. Oh yeah, and my macbook was ~$700 cheaper. He is constantly cursing his new system, well was, until I helped him install Ubuntu on it, now it runs fast. If your whole reason for supporting Vista is GPU preemption, well, I'm pretty sure thats a mistake.
Why are people acting like the studies in 1991/2 can't be valid?
Just because they weren't connected to a monitor, typewriters have existed for many decades.
I don't think they are any more "ergonomic" than current computer keyboards. Point being, why did CTS suddenly become this dire disease that everyone was worried about just now in the last 10 years? People have been typing hundreds of words per minute for at least the last 60 years.
Further, there are many many jobs in manufacturing that required repetitive movements. Why don't these repeated movements cause CTS?
I've worried on and off about CTS since I first heard about it in the late 90's. I've been typing > 100wpm since I was 14 and using a computer > 10 hours/day since at least 1995. I've never had any symptoms, but these studies do reduce my concern over the "cause" of CTS.
Your first point is the biggest problem with RoR. Rails is hideously bad at playing nice with others. Have a legacy DB that Rails didn't create for you? As another reply said, if I see that is the case, I rule out Rails as a web framework right there. It won't work end of story.
AR really wants the DB set up in its particular way, and if its not, nothing will make it work.
There are many many more mature and powerful ORMs out there that will handle this kind of thing, some are built into existing web frameworks... but RoR and AR are not it. If you aren't starting completely from scratch (meaning database too) then RoR is the wrong choice 100% of the time.
Of course, these "trials" would just be a big get out of jail free card for all terrorists. It's not like the army has the time, money, manpower to reconstruct a battle and get incontrovertible evidence that combatant X fired rifle Y at 8:32pm and wounded or killed Soldier Z.
In a real trial, that is what you have to have to convict. Probably a great boon for CSI's.. There'd be thousands of new jobs running around Iraq and Afghanistan trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these people are bad. Probably get a lot of dead CSIs too... but anyway.
My point is, wouldn't it be trivially easy for these guys to get off? Firing guns and throwing grenades (with gloves on) one minute see they are about to lose, throw all their guns in a heap before the US gets too close, go to the enemy combatant trial. The US says "You were on the battle field" they say "yeah but we weren't fighting you, the guys who were fighting ran off, you have no proof that we fired weapons at you". And they'd be right. These guys would get off in a US court of law 100% of the time. Probably any court set up by the UN would be at least as nice to criminals as the US courts.
So then the only option is "we found these 100 guys and we killed them on the battlefield". Because if you take them prisoner, they'll be back out there 2 weeks later shooting at you again.
Ok,
Python is slower than C, C++ and Java... Guess what? So are PHP, Ruby, Perl, and every other interpreted language.
However, if it takes me 10 programmer hours to create a python program (or PHP, Ruby, Perl) program, and the program takes 10 seconds to process 50,000 records from my database while the C version of this program takes 500 programmer hours and takes 1 second to process 50,000 records.... how long does it take before the C program is faster?
about 9.8 billion records... well, at our current rate of record growth, I'll be there in about year 2500, even assuming 50% growth/yr (completely unsustainable for any enterprise past 10 years) its still 2100 before the time saved by the program equals the time saved on programming time... Not to mention CPU time costs less than 1 cent/hr, and programmers are much more expensive.
And for the record, we have done this. We recently re-wrote a C application in python, the original application took 5 programmers 3 years to create, we recreated it in python with 2 programmers in 6 months, it is feature complete vs the C implementation, it is slower, but not outside of what would be considered reasonable. We also haven't even tried to optimize it at all... which we could do and probably at least get 10-20% improvements in performance.
Now, in saying this am I saying interpreted languages are the answer to every problem? No! Sometimes, you need C, sometimes there are problems that can't be solved well in any specific language. If there was a be all end all language, we'd all be using it. Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby all have their place, in general I prefer Python because I find it much more intuitive than Perl, I find generally better programmers advertising Python jobs than advertising PHP jobs, and I just like it better than Ruby
You obviously have very little experience with java programs.
All java programs require some version or other of java, and if java has made incompatible changes (they have) between releases, you need 2 versions of the JVM to run 2 different programs (if those programs require says 1.4 and 5 respectively). This can be extremely fun, especially since each JVM is going to take up 2-300MB of ram...
I have seen this problem deploying enterprise java apps hundreds of times, it is pretty much constant "Oh, I want to run App1 version 3.2 which requires Java 1.3, I also want to run App2 version 6.4 which requires Java 6" Have Fun!
well, the marketing department loves it. this strategy just means larger budgets for them!
I agree the piece was a little heavy on fluff, and I agree we should try to figure out the stuff we don't know. I think he advocates for that as well... at least I got that feeling. I got the feeling he would like people to take a "lets know what we're doing before we do it" approach.
I am really all for cleaning up the environment, I would love an electric car, I would love good solar panels, or nuclear energy. I hate oil (for the political problems it causes more than pollution, but still...), but in their current incarnations they aren't good enough, they are too expensive, too unreliable, and would cause a lot of harm to the economy and standard of living of the developed world.
But the sky is falling FUD as you put it really irks me. I really feel the global warming proponents are rushing to conclusions. It's a bit like seeing you have some physical symptom and going to the emergency room and getting every possible treatment regardless of cost without getting a proper diagnosis first, at least that is how I feel most of the time when I hear them. And when I see people saying things like "Well, we should just believe the climatologists, because the worst case will be horrible, and if we don't start fixing it now it'll be too late!" That argument drives me crazy... again same thing... well you might have cancer, or it might be liver failure, or you might need a bone marrow transplant, or maybe its nothing and it will go away in 3 days. But if we wait the 3 days and it is one of the other 3, you'll be better off for starting treatment early so we better just do all 3 of the massive treatments now!
The earth is not nearly outside of historical parameters in CO2, temperatures, sea level, or anything else you can think of.
The earth has seen nearly 20 times more CO2 in the atmosphere in the last million years. It has seen a period with no ice at all on greenland. It has seen temperatures 10C warmer and 10C cooler than current temperatures. the IPCC says (not science, a governmental body run by lobbyists, and politicians) man probably is causing "some" warming. They don't say how much, they don't say how likely, just probably... that could be 51%. And, why is "warming" undesirable? I have yet to get a decent answer on that one. I like it when its warm. I like sunny summer days, I like grass, and green trees, and rain. Snow is fun as a novelty.. but it sucks after a couple weeks. I like the idea of being able to grow crops for 9-10 months out of the year, all the way up into southern canada. I like the idea of having vineyards in the UK again (yeah, in the mideval warm period they grew grapes in GB, something nearly impossible today) and that was only 500-800 years ago, that it was that much warmer in Europe.
Now, the only thing I'll agree with you on is your last point, we should stop subsidizing terrorists, and we should free ourselves from the grip of foreign oil, because that is the right policy direction for the country. But, if we had huge oil reserves, I would say burn those before we spend billions if not trillions on renewables. Of course nuclear power would make this all moot... and that is what we really should do
So Einstein was an idiot to?
He was quoted many times saying the same thing about science and deity.
1) your quip about "betting their life" on climatologists being wrong is quite bone headed. People bet their lives every day, and on things much more certain. You bet your life every time you get in a car. Guaranteed 50k people will die this year in the US riding in cars. Why don't you stop betting your life on that "sacred" convenience? How many people is climate change going to kill this year? Even if the "worst case" happens how many people is climate change going to kill? What are the chances you are one of those people? Why should I spend my life's savings buying an electric car, putting solar panels on my roof (that I'll have to replace every 20 years), and in general destroying my standard of living to avoid a calamity that NO ONE can even put anything like a percentage on.
2) Why not assume they are right? Because the costs are astronomical! It's not a "sacred" lifestyle, its a lifestyle that has lengthened life expectancy by 30 years in just 100. You go live "sustainably" for a few years in africa, come back and tell me how that was for you. Modern life requires the use of energy. I would be more than happy to have an electric car, to not use fossil fuels, but, if it means that I have to work longer hours, or harder to maintain the same amount of freedom, then no its not worth it. And that is what it means today because it is way more expensive. Now, if you environmentalists would let us build some nuclear power plants, we could probably solve all the problems.
The problem isn't purely meteorological. That is why the models don't work. Sure they are complicated and very advanced, but they don't take into account the increased carbon sequestration that plants automatically do when presented with higher CO2 in the atmosphere (as he states in the article). And they also aren't very good at dealing with random things like clouds, dust, or other non-fluid dynamics type phenomena.
I love how you just out of hand discredit him because he's not an "expert" in the field. As if thinking rational people can't have a debate about something unless they have a PhD and 20 years experience in a field. How many advanced science degrees does Al Gore have? Years experience studying climate models? Years spent in Antarctica studying climate? Why does he get to be an "expert" in the field? Dyson is a pretty smart guy you know. Physics and all that, I think he might have at least a basic understanding of fluid dynamics, energy transfer, energy storage... yeah pretty much the basics of "climate". I'd certainly listen to and trust him before Al Gore...
I'm not an "expert" in the field though so don't listen to me either. Of course the only people you will admit to being "experts" in the field will be people who agree with your world view.
I really don't think so. What I read said "I studied the models, and they don't take x, y, or z into account, because we don't understand them, but certainly x, y and z have an effect on climate, therefore the models are oversimplifications and cannot be trusted"
He is not arguing from incredulity, he is stating that the models don't take important factors into account because they are extremely hard to model, or we have never measured them and therefore don't have a dataset to put into a model.
The models as he states do a great job with fluid dynamics, but they suck at clouds, dust (probably smoke from forest fires and volcanoes too), and anything else that doesn't fit in a fluid dynamics world... which is quite a lot really. And I'm sure you'll come back with "well, if we wait to see if the models are right or not, it'll be too late, so we have to ACT NOW!" That is the default response from any global warming nazi when challenged with "why don't we try to really figure out whats happening before we spend trillions of dollars fixing a problem that might not exist?"
I swear you environmentalists are crazy. What you are proposing would be like you go to the doctor, you have a slight fever, he does a single test that is incorrect 50% of the time, and then recommends you spend $1,000,000 to get a liver transplant, kidney transplants, heart transplant, bone marrow transplant, and just for fun, chemo cause it might be cancer too. Or, maybe you should just take a Tylenol and call him in the morning? But no, if we wait for just 10 minutes and think about it, and try to get a better diagnosis, well if the first diagnosis is right then you'll be dead, so better just go with that!
Yeah... great record keeping like the NASA scientists who had a bug in their code? You did read the article earlier today where some hobbyist on the internet found a huge error, 1998 isn't the warmest year on record now. You know that the last decade isn't the warmest on record anymore either right? Yeah the 1930's get that distinction again... now that NASA isn't lying about their data anymore.
Anyway, the point isn't "is the world getting warmer" it is "are we causing it" and maybe "can we fix it or should we". The first can be seen (to some extent) in measurements, in shrinking glaciers... Of course, the glaciers have been shrinking for the last 12,000 years since the last ice age, obviously we didn't cause the end of the last ice age, we didn't cause any of the shrinking of glaciers from then until 1900... but you claim we are 100% responsible for the shrinking since then? Based on what evidence? What science? What experiments? Or do you contend that the glaciers were as large in 1900 as they were 12000 years ago, and they weren't shrinking before 1900?
The other 2 questions he answers by saying "we don't know and can't know, but its highly improbably given trends since the last ice age", and "no we shouldn't fix it because a warmer climate is generally better for everyone".
As he points out very clearly in his article, the "global warming proponents" aren't relying on measurement, observations, or scientific method either. They are relying on computer models. Very poor ones at that. The models aren't capable of recreating the climate, or even a meaningful subset of the climate and the complicated interactions that happen between all of the earth's pieces. That is all he is saying, that we don't have enough information, that the world appears to be getting warmer, but that the cause is unknown, and really unknowable, and he says "heretically" that even if we are causing the warming is that such a bad thing? Will it be bad to have warmer winters? longer growing seasons? more rain? (he lays out quite clearly that in warmer periods in Africa and Europe those continents see an increase in precipitation). He also suggests a way to "combat" carbon in the atmosphere and shows the huge insignificance of the CO2 levels.... If we were to sequester all of the carbon in the atmosphere it would add 1/100th of an inch to the arable land on the planet.